Category: sitecore

Posted on

Sitecore Launch Hiccups and Resolution

I know it has been a while, Vacationing and launch has been no joke on my side. 🙂
It has surely taken a toll and kept me away from blogging for quite a few days.  Finally, today I got some time to jot down the experiences of my launch after a pause.

Time Taken: 14 hrs straight starting 5.00 PM to Mid night around 2.00 AM PST, it was a grueling long night and I was supporting the go-live from India, how fun!

Sadly, I did not expect any issues or what so ever because we had code already up and running on the actual servers with all the things working and QA/UAT pass.  The only thing that was changing was DNS and binding being different, rest everything was absolutely same.  Well, everything does not happen as planned especially on the launch day.   I was supporting using a fairly fast internet for Indian standards, but, still fell a little short as I was used to things being done fast.

Below are few hiccups and how we resolved each of these, hope it helps some one who is stuck in a similar situation.

  1. xDB Cloud working excellent on sandbox license, but, lot of issues when swapped to prod license.    While launching the site, we obviously have to swap the connection strings to use production xDB license provided by sitecore.  We did so, but, as a surprise we encountered bunch of errors on logs and had to re-visit all the related configs to ensure we did everything as expected.  Sitecore did not mention in support ticket that extra steps would be needed on live license which are additional as compared to non-prod xDB license.  We followed the below blog and added host file entry as mentioned and left hostname empty on configuration. https://sitecorehacker.com/2017/02/12/sitecore-analytics-tracker-common-issues-and-how-to-resolve-them/
  2. IIS security hardening done prior to enabling anonymous access to the site.  It is kind of common practice that when we have a pre-prod or staging site behind some kind of authentication to ensure site is not publicly available since it is meant to be.  As part of deployment strategy, we had steps listed and unfortunately they were ordered incorrectly.  Since, enabling anonymous on parent site would trigger that change to all children and folders within the site, the hardening we had done per sitecore recommendations on CD servers was lost and we had to re-do the steps.  These things add time post launch especially on VPN, connected to remote servers from INDIA. lol
  3. Coveo cache – Still unsure what was causing Coveo to access a URL that is no longer configured on either Server URL or for that matter any where else.  While rebuilding master index, it kept failing saying that could not reach to a binding which is no longer available.  I am assuming it is some kind of cache, unsure where or what at this time.  I ensured there was no trace of old/outdated URL any where by going to /showconfig.aspx and also reviewing coveo configuration files.  Still a mystery to solve, but fortunately the error did not mean indexes were not built, so, we were safe to move forward and were successfully able to rebuild other web and liveweb indexes with out errors.
  4. Cache – It is a boon and blessing.  We had set up cache on all renderings applicable.  But, there was a slight miss.  Parent placeholders that carried WFFM should not be allowed to cache, but, there were few misses which were uncovered only on regression testing that few forms were not working, once we removed cacheable setting on these renderings forms started working like a charm.
  5. Errors on Log files –  It is important to monitor log files to check for any major errors on the logs that clutter the server and could have slow response times.  We un-covered a few and still in progress on identifying all the outstanding issues.
  6. Redirects –  On our lower environments we had few different settings like www was being forced as it was not needed which was enabled post launch as a requirement.  This started throwing off the logic and plan around redirects.  We had to revamp the redirects loaded to ensure they are working alright and corrected few instances.  Especially when migrating or unifying multiple sites this could pose a challenge.  How I wish we had exact same settings and tested the logic against that to reduce this back and forth.
At the end, all was well.  I am glad we stretched it instead of calling it off, it is a worst feeling to do a rollback.  Launch would mean a great move in the forward direction, never would want to associate it with a failure.  I am glad the site went live and has been appreciated both internally and public facing.
Looking forward to more adventures in the future.
Happy Weekend every one!
Posted on

A different paradigm to bump up your site performance

You might have seen ample number of blogs, information and other resources out there that talk about the same topic.  But, I will try and make this in steps, so you have step-by-step guide all in here and you will surely spend less time scraping this data from 10 other places.
At the end, I will also list references on where I gathered all this from, so, you can refer and read more if you are an enthusiastic reader.

Have you heard about Google page speed extension?  If you did not, it is fine and I will not say you were living in a cave, in this functional desire world, I wonder why performance is always addressed at the very end of the tunnel in software life cycle.  I would go ahead and say a simple performance test plan should be part of every step of implementation.   It could be simple, but invasive.  It would help mitigate surprises which usually take time to resolve.

There are tons of tools out there as well to measure performance, but, I got hooked on to Google page speeds extension as it is easy to visualize and Google does do a good job of providing links to problems that were uncovered which would provide good insight to multiple solutions to the problem on hand.

Let us get this started –

1. First do not expect anything,  don’t assume that your site is great or worst in terms of performance.  Just download the extension of your favorite choice, I like the Google Page Speeds extension, but, you could run anything
2. Address to one’s Google put’s more weight on and are in red.  I think that would be the critical one’s for sure.  I did the following and saw immediate boost on numbers

Images and Images (Scaling and Optimization)

Firstly ensure you are scaling images on server side (Using Glass params) instead of depending on content authors to upload files of certain dimensions.  Though we tried to enforce this through documentation and collaboration, we still saw lapse.
Best way to battle this is use Glass params, then, regardless of whether recommended size is respected or not, your browser will not spend ton of time sizing and re-sizing images to fit your FEE needs(css)
Get the params based on FEE recommendations, the best thing to do is set width and let height be auto.

Example :@RenderImage(carouselSlide, m => m.Carousel_Image, new { @class = “carousel__image”, w = 684, width = 684 }, true, outputHeightWidth: true)
Please re-upload all imagery that is not respecting the dimensions.  This is important for performance and critical
Also, ensure good/web optimized imagery is loaded on to media library.  If tool complains that some images could do better in terms of performance, please re-upload the culprits.  Should be quick and the tool offers a download option on each of the offensive currently uploaded image.  Go to sitecore editor and do simple attach/detach.  You are done.
Make sure all your site specific css/js is minified and only those minified versions are accessed in your HTML or view code
Ensure web server has compression enabled.  This is a simple check of a checkbox available on IIS under compression for a specific site(Ensure static compression is checked).  Sometimes, if installation is not done correctly even if you checkbox this it might not work.  Please ensure this works by looking at Network request and content-encoding attribute is being set as ‘gzip’.  You can check in fiddler or on Google chrome by toggling the column display to show this response header.  If you dont see gzip, please check with support once you ensure you have enabled the IIS settings properly and things seem off.  This is v important for performance and must be ensured is working
Enable cache control on static resources on web.config to ensure you enable this after talking to your FEE team on what would be a good max age time.  It could vary based on multiple things and should be verified with your team.

After these steps, please follow sitecore performance tuning guide no less than Bible(link in references), go over all content delivery preferences and ensure you set all of them correctly.  When in question about something please check with your support team.

That is it, you just made your sitecore instance super efficient.  The tuning guide should also cover caching best practices which should bump up good performance benefit second load on wards.

Happy Sitecoring!!

Few Good References

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore7/70/cms_tuning_guide_sc70-72-usletter.pdf
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-pagespeed-insights/edbkhhpodjkbgenodomhfoldapghpddk?hl=en
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/EnableCompression

Posted on

Sitecore URL Duplication

Sitecore is amazing when it comes to how it can resolve a URL seamlessly to an item and how we can tune that based on requirements and project demands.
In most of the blogs out there – Good reads
https://jammykam.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/seo-friendly-urls-in-sitecore-prevention-is-better-than-cure/  – My Fav
http://reinoudvandalen.nl/blog/using-replacement-characters-in-sitecore-the-right-way/
https://www.cmsbestpractices.com/add-seo-value-by-replacing-spaces-with-dashes-in-sitecore/

you will see how you can tackle LinkManager using  to ensure you always have a good SEO friendly URL using <encodeNameReplacements> and how to avoid the side effects of this by ensuring we do not allow hyphen in item names using “InvalidItemNameChars”

Now, there are other problems we will have to deal with.  Google does not like duplicate content, which means when two URL’s yield same result, in our case render same item content.  It means it is duplication.

But, though spaces are replaced by hyphens internally, it does not do anything when user or say some refferal link some where actually has spaces
For example – www.domain.com/test%20page and www.domain.com/test%20page would yield same page/content

Not Good…Google would not like it!

So, good SEO options are either do a 404 on space version(%20) above or do a 301 re-direct.  Canononical links might help a little if you cant do both of the above.

You could also you IIS re-write rules to replace spaces with ‘-‘ instead of %20

Wait for more…

  

Posted on

Item Publish and Save Random Errors(Coveo)

Sitecore Item Publish and Save Errors

One day, though I did not do any specific config level changes, I started getting lot of errors, items were not saving, publish was not happening.  Same object reference errors on every single major operation on my sitecore instance.
I looked at the logs and see bunch of Coveo related errors, Yes, I had Coveo installed on this instance.  I ran the diagnostic tool of Coveo and see bunch of services having issues.  Even the indexing was broken.  It seems Coveo patches on to lot of Item pipelines like save, publish, etc.,
To debug this, there are few common steps you need to do and for most cases below should work.
In my case, I was using Windows Credentials for Coveo services and I had changed my password. 😉
But, it could be other service related issues that could be causing it –  So, the traditional magic steps are –

1. Ensure Coveo Diagnostic is all green
2. Go to Windows Services and ensure all Coveo services are up and running.
  Note – Some times the services show up as running, but, infact they would be broken.  When issues persist, try to stop and restart service after ensuring credentials are correct.
3. Tip – wait for few seconds before starting the service after you stop it
4. Re-index all Coveo Indexes
5. Check Diagnostics again to ensure

These steps should help most of issues specifically when everything is installed correctly initially.
As always Coveo first time install is always rough on newbies.  But, slowly you will get good hang of it, once you know the components.

Good Reads –
https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV3/Troubleshooting+Problems+Using+the+Coveo+Diagnostic+Page;jsessionid=2E0BEDF7A39D390CB791743AAE57FF87

https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV3/Resolving+Coveo+for+Sitecore%27s+Most+Common+Issues

Posted on

Tapping on to Duplicate Item pipeline – Sitecore

Tapping Duplicate Item Pipeline


One of the latest requirements and challenging request was to tap on to duplicate item pipeline on latest version of Sitecore.  As of this writing, Sitecore 8.1, update 3.
Every time I have a problem on my hand, to come up with a solution, I clearly imprint on my brain what my goal is, this actually helps find different ways to achieve what you want the system on hand to do.
My goal was to tap on to duplicateitem pipeline somehow to do few renaming and change of few references post duplication of a specific item on the content tree.  The key here is specific item, I dont want this custom code to run if the duplication is done on any other item, so, it is important to know where and how I can patch this to successfully instruct sitecore. “Hey! If content author is duplicating this ‘xyz’ item only, perform a set of operations”
I ran across couple blogs to start understanding what happens behind the scenes.  Not much of help as either these are outdated and probably not close to what I was looking for….
So, time to write it up, so any one who is looking for some direction on how to tap to duplicate pipeline.

Trials and Failure


I went ahead and looked at my “showconfig.aspx”, found the below related config section under processors and this felt like perfect place I could patch on to –

<uiDuplicateItem>
<processor mode=”on“ type=”Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Pipelines.DuplicateItem,Sitecore.Kernel“ method=”CheckPermissions“/>
<processor mode=”on“ type=”Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Pipelines.DuplicateItem,Sitecore.Kernel“ method=”GetName“/>
<processor mode=”on“ type=”Sitecore.Buckets.Pipelines.UI.ItemDuplicate, Sitecore.Buckets“ method=”Execute“ patch:source=”Sitecore.Buckets.config“/>
<processor mode=”on“ type=”Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Pipelines.DuplicateItem,Sitecore.Kernel“ method=”Execute“/>
</uiDuplicateItem>

I tried patching to most apt looking processor which is “Sitecore.Shell.Framework.Pipelines.DuplicateItem”, did not work. 🙁

It is because of introduction of buckets which I came across while reading related blogs out there. Great read if you have time.

http://jockstothecore.com/a-tale-of-three-friends-close-look-at-three-sitecore-pipelines/

Based on this article, I patched on to before the buckets related pipeline for duplicate 
that is ‘Sitecore.Buckets.Pipelines.UI.ItemDuplicate’

The challenge here was the client args in the info object had array of fields under the item that is to be duplicated which I had no way to overwrite. So, it does not achieve my goal, scrap that. 

Then, I thought I will tap SaveItem pipeline, but, I will loose the context of which item is being duplicated and either way’s duplicateitem does not trigger save item pipeline, so that would not work. 

I am hitting walls in every direction, but, I need to keep looking and trying…

Voila Moment!!!!!

I was curious what does Sitecore.Buckets Item Duplicate pipeline does with Client Args as that route made most sense.  It seems only thing the code uses from Client Args was the “Name” for the new item. 
While exploring the code on Kernel dll using reflector, I see that it directly calls Context.Workflow.DuplicateItem(item, args[“name”)).  This is getting interesting, seems like I see light at the end of the tunnel. 

Explored more deeper, chain of methods called from this point one ->

Item.Duplicate(copyName)
this.CopyTo(parent,copyName)
this.CopyTo(more params)
ItemManager.CopyItem(all params)
Provider.CopyItem(params related)

On derived type of copyItem of Provider, I see something that caught my eye. 
It calls GetDataEngine and proceeding with CopyItem on DataEngine.  Dug more deeper..
It calls CopyItemCommand’s Execute, Voila!!! I found my answer. Panicking with excitement, I tried extending CopyItemCommand’s prototype using the below kind of config edits 


<database id=”master” singleInstance=”true” type=”Sitecore.Data.Database, Sitecore.Kernel”>
        <Engines.DataEngine.Commands.CopyItemPrototype>       
          <obj type=”Yournamespace.ClassName, DLL” />
        </Engines.DataEngine.Commands.CopyItemPrototype>
      </database>

I followed similar syntax from Sitecore.Buckets.Config to make this work.  There is a catch, always make sure you are overriding CreateInstance method and returning your new class in that method, otherwise it will not consider your class as valid prototype and will take the default one. 
Now extend the class “Sitecore.Data.Engines.DataCommands.CopyItemCommand”

It worked!!!!

I could get the source item, destination item(parent), copy ID(new id to be created) and I can extend the Executed method now to add my own business logic.  

Make sure you you call base.Executed() to ensure the base functionality is still in place. 

Good Reads/Helpful Related articles
https://reasoncodeexample.com/2013/01/13/changing-sitecore-item-references-when-creating-copying-duplicating-and-cloning/

http://jockstothecore.com/a-tale-of-three-friends-close-look-at-three-sitecore-pipelines/

http://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/john-west-sitecore-blog/posts/2010/11/intercepting-item-updates-with-sitecore.aspx

Posted on

Purpose of Area field on Sitecore 8.1?

So, It all started with an un-answered question on sitecore community on why the ‘Area’ field does not seem to work on View Rendering.
https://community.sitecore.net/developers/f/8/t/3509

Field In Question

Human tendency is if we are taking pain to enter a value for a field on sitecore, it does do something dynamically.  The first thought is, if I fill in the Area field on Sitecore Rendering Item, It should auto pick the path to my *.cshtml by constructing it rather than depending on us to fill in full path of the view in the Path field.

But, if I tried that it caused error on my end that it can not find the view.
I started reading around to see what is the purpose of this Area field? May be the purpose is bigger/better? I mean sitecore added this in the latest release.

Good Reads Below –
http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/Digital/how-we-think/articles/2015/10/Sitecore-8-1-MVC-Improvements-Area-Support-and-MVC-5-2-3.aspx
https://ctor.io/new-in-sitecore-8-1-mvc-areas/
https://citizensitecore.com/2015/10/26/mvc-areas-in-sitecore-8-1-a-step-by-step-guide/

Based on the blogs, this new token or field value could be used for view resolutions inside your controller or view renderings, but, sitecore would still need full path in the path field.

So, the gist is you read this field as you read any other field on the code.  Only note is if you need to use this field value on code use it by name and not GUID(As it is unique obviously for each rendering).

Something like..Sitecore.Context.Site.Properties[“area”];

If you have your own Area Resolving strategy, which by the way you need to plugin properly for it to work, then in your class use the Area value when needed.

Got it! Some purposes that could pay off on adding this new field.  I am still curious to know the ground breaking reason if any that Sitecore added this field.

Anyone???

Posted on

Sitecore 8.1 Update 3 – Bug on Scheduling Tasks

For my upcoming project, one of the requirement was to run a scheduled job every 24 hours.  Fair enough I hardly remember how to accomplish this as on my previous projects I was using console application with windows scheduler to do the needful.  This time around, I wanted to explore what sitecore offers out of the box for this demands.  It was cool, very simple and easy to do so.

Understanding – My first step 
I explored couple of blogs to gain understanding on how scheduled tasks and commands work on Sitecore.  Please see the references that helped me a lot.

https://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2014/08/09/scheduled-task-basics/
https://briancaos.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/run-sitecore-scheduled-task-at-the-same-time-every-day/
https://www.degdigital.com/insights/how-to-create-sitecore-scheduled-task/
For even more deeper understanding and if you have time refer to below as well –
http://www.sitecore.net/Learn/Blogs/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2010/11/All-About-Sitecore-Scheduling-Agents-and-Tasks.aspx

Debugging – Crucial One
For triggering the jobs manually, this is for debugging purpose and for us devs with out this, we can not successfully test the code that runs on command trigger.  There are multiple options to do this, I found the below module available on market place, it was very easy to install and fairly simple UI to deal with, I tried others, but, I could not make it to work or documentation was missing some steps.  I recommend below one –
http://sitecoreblog.blogspot.in/2011/07/new-module-on-trac.html
Note – After you install, many newbies who have not worked on Toolbox might not know where this UI get’s installed, it is in “All Programs -> ToolBox -> ScheduledTasksUtil .  Click and view all jobs on your instance and trigger any one you wish to debug manually.  Cool! Simple! Isn’t it.

Actual Bug  – 

I logged a support ticket for this, I will update this blog post based on sitecore team comments. Though the bug is not huge and has a workaround that we could do for new projects, for teams who might have this issue and if that goes un-recognized could be great deal of problems especially when syncing super important data feed or something.

Here goes the issue –

When I create a scheduled task, there is an option to set the schedule, for example if I need to set a command to run every 24 hours based on documentation by John West, we need to do below as format suggests HH:mm:ss
But, if I have 24 set in the hours, sitecore is reading that as 24 days instead of 24 hours, for any number lesser than 24, it reads correctly as hours.
It does not seem to be an intuitive behavior and looks like a bug while converting hours to days.

On our end, we can proceed by setting this number to less than 24 like 23 as that works fine, but, I wanted to report this regardless as it could be broken on sitecore instances where they had set up a schedule for every 24 hours as this will be running on their end for every 24 days instead of hours.
See some screenshots below.
Example Schedule that has unexpected assignment on schedule –




Loaded up Schedule Object Interval showing 24 days instead of hours. 

Work Around (Update from Sitecore team)

It seems this is how .Net above 3.5 deals with it on Time parse.  See more details below.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/764618/timespan-parse-24-00-00-returns-24-00-00-00-instead-of-throwing-an-overflowexception

On Sitecore side, the format that has to be used on latest versions of .net frame work would be to use below format for 24 hours.
Example – 20160714|21000714|127|1.00:00:00